ਫਿਲੌਰਫਿਲੌਰ

Phillaur is a municipal council town and tehsil headquarters in Jalandhar district of Punjab, India, on the north bank of the Sutlej River and the Grand Trunk Road. It counted 24,688 residents in the 2011 census. Its red brick fort, rebuilt by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1809, now houses the Punjab Police Academy.

Where is Phillaur?

Phillaur stands at about 234 metres above sea level where the Doaba meets the Puadh country, on the north bank of the Sutlej, the river that forms the Doaba's southern edge. Ludhiana is about 20 kilometres across the river to the south, Jalandhar about 45 kilometres to the north west, and Amritsar about 140 kilometres away. The Grand Trunk Road, now National Highway 1, runs through the town, and the older line of the road still survives beside the railway bridge towards Ludhiana. Phillaur is a railway junction, with the branch towards Lohian Khas leaving the main line here and passing Nurmahal on its way. The tehsil it heads is much bigger than the town: 381,732 people in 2011, including the nagar panchayat of Goraya and a long list of farming villages.

History: from Phulnagar to a border fort

Town tradition names a Sanghera Jat, Phul, as the founder, and his settlement was first called Phulnagar. Naru Rajputs under Ratan Pal later held the place, and its position on the imperial road soon mattered more than its founders. In the reign of Sher Shah Suri, from 1540 to 1545, a sarai, a fortified inn for traders and troops, was raised here, and the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan later revived it as an imperial sarai. In the misl period the Sikh chief Sardar Sudh Singh Kang made Phillaur his headquarters. The turning point came in 1809: under the Treaty of Amritsar the Sutlej became the border of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire, and the sarai was rebuilt as a full fort, designed by his general Dewan Mohkam Chand with the help of the Maharaja's French and Italian officers, as a deliberate answer to the British position across the river at Ludhiana. Raja Dhanpat Rai managed the post and acted as the Maharaja's munshi for the lands across the Sutlej.

After the Sikh defeat at Aliwal in 1846 the British took the fort, using it first as an artillery depot. In 1891 it became a police training centre, the oldest in India, and the Finger Print Bureau set up here in 1892 remains among the region's oldest forensic institutions. The Punjab government renamed the fort the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Fort in 1973, and since 1981 it has housed the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Punjab Police Academy. The road and river that made the fort also made the town's trade: before Partition, Phillaur was the main timber market of Punjab, where logs cut in the Shivalik hills were floated down the Sutlej and gathered here for onward transport, and a dedicated railway line served that trade.

Geography and people

The municipal council counted 24,688 people in the 2011 census, up from 22,302 in 2001: 12,962 men and 11,726 women, living across about 7.5 square kilometres in 15 wards. Scheduled Castes formed 11,419 of the residents, and 8,384 people were recorded as workers, most of them in main work through the year. By religion, Hindus formed 80.23 percent of the town, Sikhs 14.68 percent, Buddhists 2.43 percent, Christians 1.37 percent and Muslims 0.97 percent, a mix that reflects the fort, the academy and the old trading mohallas as much as the farming villages around it. Punjabi is the language of daily life. The Sutlej floodplain south of the town gives Phillaur lower, greener fields than the towns to its north, and the river ghats and the bridge remain part of local life, especially for families whose work and kin lie across the water in Ludhiana district.

What is Phillaur known for?

Phillaur is known for its fort. The Maharaja Ranjit Singh Fort is a red brick citadel with a distinct European character: channels and a moat dug along its boundary, high walls with inward sloping outer faces built to shed artillery fire, four strong bastions at the corners, and watchtowers over its two gateways, the Delhi Gate to the east and the Lahori Gate to the west, each rising three storeys. Inside the walls stand the police academy, its museum of historical artefacts and the Finger Print Bureau, and the complex also holds the shrine of Pir Baba Abdullah Shah Ji, revered locally across communities. Because the fort is a working academy, public access is restricted and visitors should plan accordingly: for most travellers the fort is admired from the Grand Trunk Road and the river side, and the Sutlej bridge and the old road complete the view.

Notable people

Phillaur's best known son is Sher Muhammad Khan (1927 to 1978), the Urdu poet and humorist loved across Pakistan and India under his pen name Ibn e Insha. He was born here before Partition carried his family across the new border, and his playful, tender verse still carries the town's name with it. A generation earlier the town gave its name to Shardha Ram Phillauri, the local scholar who composed the popular hymn Jai Jagdish Hare here in the 1870s and who wrote what is generally considered the first novel in Hindi; a memorial in the town commemorates him. Behind both stands the founder Phul, whose Phulnagar slowly shortened into the Phillaur the railway boards and road signs carry today.

Getting there, and Phillaur today

Phillaur Junction is served by trains on the main line between Ludhiana and Jalandhar, with the branch line running south east through Nurmahal to Lohian Khas. By road, National Highway 1 and the old Grand Trunk Road link the town to Ludhiana, Goraya and Jalandhar, with buses through the day. Its PIN code is 144410, its telephone code is 01826 and its vehicle registration is PB 37. Today Phillaur is a working tehsil town: courts and offices, the police academy inside its two century old fort, bazaars serving its villages, and the daily flow of students, trainees and traders across the Sutlej bridge. Few Punjab towns carry so many layers in so small a compass: a Jat founder's village, a Mughal sarai, a Sikh border fort and a modern academy, all on one bend of the river.